Your city needs you! It only takes one concerned citizen to get the ball rolling. We have been asked by members of other cities how to get a movement like this started. Below is a condensed version of our suggested approach. Your mileage may vary. Please feel free to contact us for advice, support, questions or anything else we can do to help you restore privacy to your city.
Civic engagement can be fun, and focusing on the city level is much more fulfilling than the mudslinging mess that is state and federal level politics.
1) Create a free email address on proton mail, ideally Deflock[your city name here]
2) Google your city’s records request portal, create an account using your new email address.
3) Create a free cloudflare.com account
4) Via Cloudflare, purchase the domain Deflock[your city name here].com, this will cost you ~$10/year
If you are not technical, we would suggest springing for the most basic wordpress plan, and use their guide on how to link your domain to wordpress.
If you are technical, you can install WordPress studio locally, use a plugin called “simply static” to export static versions of your site, and then commit them to a git repo. Tie your repo to a free cloudflare worker. Check this tutorial, and feel free to contact us for help getting this setup.
Of the 2 approaches, simply paying wordpress to host for you is going to be way less complicated. However going the complicated route means hosting is free. Your only cost would be the ~$10/year domain registration cost.
5) Start showing up to city council every time public comment is allowed and use your time to politely and persistently keep pressure up on the system. See examples of public comment given prior, and feel free to lift any wording you find there that speaks to you
6) Records Requests: Washington public records laws are amazing! Make sure you always ask for digital delivery so you don’t get fees to print things.
Research any records requests fees for your location, with everything being digital it should be between free to extremely cheap, Washington really limits how much they can charge you. The highest we have seen so far is $0.05 per 4 documents.
Don’t file massive requests with many bullet points. Each bullet point should be its own request, otherwise they can drag their feet on delivering much longer than they can for small targeted requests.
When requesting emails, ideally ask for them in PST format, this can be exported however you want, but is much easier to search and index. (Check out “EM Client” to view PST files) We have seen some cities play dumb about email records requests, acting as if they will need to go to every staff member and manually search their inboxes. Know that all commercial email products have some form of eDiscovery tool that lets them make searches of all emails in an org trivially. If they try to play this game, contact us and we can help with the verbiage to ‘remind’ them of this capability depending on what system they use, which you can determine via their MX records.
For each records request, include the verbiage at the end “Please ensure that this request, all city responses, and all provided documents are made publicly visible. If there will be costs associated with this request, please provide a breakdown of expected costs prior to fulfilling the request, and do not fulfill if the cost exceeds $5 without my written consent”
File the following records requests, each line its own request
- Map of all alpr cameras, flock or otherwise
- Get the initial contract the city has with flock, any subsequent contracts, and including when it is up for renewal.
- Ask if the city is using any other alpr vendors and if so, for all documents associated with them.
- Ask for all City policies regarding use of alprs and their human auditing. If auditing is in effect, ask for all audit details.
- Ask for the full audit log of the flock system from the moment it was turned on until the moment the request is fulfilled, including all possible requests from in City departments and external departments.
- Ask for all emails from, any City official, elected official, or police officer , to and from the flocksafety.com domain for the past 5 years in PST format. A note about this request, Flock is very aware of public records requests. Odds are this one wont give you much of anything interesting. They are very careful to basically exclusively send meeting invites so they can chat in web conferences and sidestep record request.
- Ask for all emails from any City official, elected official, or police official containing the word ‘flock’ from the past 5 years in PST format.
- Ask for details on the city’s use of cell phone location data
- Ask for details on the city’s use of cell site location simulators.
7) Print a couple of t-shirts, ideally in a bright color linking to your website and having giant text about how people are surveilled regardless of committing crimes. Is it even a movement if you don’t have merch? We opted for bright red t-shirts with bold white text, and a SVG icon of a stylized flock camera. Have fun with this one, and give them to like minded people. Getting a batch of t-shirts is pretty cheap (We use printful) and can really make a splash.
8) Post on your local subreddit or any other local social media at least once a month with updates on the current status of things.
9) Contact each of your council members asking them to pause the network for further assessment. Ask that they physically cover the cameras during the pause as well as multiple paused networks have been found to still be feeding information back to the mothership.
10) Write op-eds for every single newspaper that covers your region.
11) Start volunteering at City related events… Odds are you’re going to run into your counselors.. Make sure you know who your counselors are! Wear your bright shirt and have a chat with them at these events! Note: Actually show up to volunteer. Its a bad look if you are just showing up to rub shoulders. Put in the work, and it may yield opportunities to chat with your council members, and will boost your reputation when people see you working to help your community.
12) Mapping: Deflock.me is fed via Open Street Map. Any cameras you discover via records requests or hunting, feed them into OSM. Note that OSM includes the angle of the camera, so if you find them via records requests, go take a picture of them so you know where they are facing. Publishing the photos of the cameras and a map can really help drive home the point. Spend a weekend or two driving down every street in your city to hunt down any other flocks. When searching for Flocks, be aware that they can have a couple of different configurations and some of them are sneakier than others… The most obvious sign is the big solar panel, but that’s not required. Check this out for an example of different ways they can mount them.
13) Research the layout of your council, and the political leanings of each candidate. If you have a paid GPT / Gemini (We currently suggest Gemini over GPT, the landscape is evolving rapidly), their deep research capabilities are CRAZY good. Pro tip with AI research, use the AI to help you use the AI. Rather than asking for what you want, tell it the following:
“You are to act as my prompt advisor, do NOT answer my question, but ask me questions to better flesh out my request which I will then feed into deep research. In the context of [your city here], I want to know the entire history of flock, as well as the political breakdown of every council member and how they lean broadly as well as in regards to public safety, privacy etc. How did each member vote on flock at the time, what concerns were raised, what dates did council discuss this technology, when was the vote.”
When you get your prompt how you want it, feed that into Deep research, which will aggressively cite its sources. CHECK THE SOURCES!!! AI HALLUCINATES!!! However in my experience, hallucinations have decreased significantly in the past year. If you don’t have paid AI send us your city name and we will get you a deep research link. The value of the deep research is less its output, but the collection of cited sources it provides you. Never ever trust anything it writes without aggressively checking its sources.
AI is great for initial research, but never EVER use AI to write for you in anything you’re doing… People can tell and it turns them off instantly. It’s a valuable tool when you use judiciously to dig up sources for your research but you will undercut your entire argument if you just barf chat GPT at people. If anything, imperfect but human writing is increasing in value in an era of perfectly polished bland robot speak
14) Physical media posting… we have actually avoided this for two reasons. First, it is technically against the law to post signage in most cities and counties on any public utility polls. While rarely enforced, you have to recognize your actions are directly poking law enforcement in the eyeballs… You don’t want to give them the slightest opportunity to come after you, so be very certain your actions are within the bounds of the law. Secondly, the ROI of such an action isn’t super high.. It’s expensive to print these things and how often do you personally engage with flyers posted in the world. We have found it’s much more effective both from an engagement and a cost perspective to either engage with people directly at volunteer events or online forums such as the subreddit for your city
15) Sedro-Woolley Precedent: If your city’s network is still active, the current precedent is that you can request all contents from the network. While you are likely to be told to pound sand, file a records request for “All data, including locations, dates, images, all license plates, anything else that can be obtained from the network for a period of 1 week” just to give em a little prod 🙂
16) Talk to absolutely everyone you can in the city. Friends, neighbors, co-workers, people you see at volunteer events, if you go to church, talk to them! Make sure people are educated about this issue and listen to their thoughts and concerns and fold those into your own
Above all, keep it friendly and try to inject some humor into it. A lot of people go to council to just spew vitriol.. never forget the council members are human and that they will react better to a joke and a smile combined with a serious policy advocacy then just yelling at them for being asshats.
Good luck, and have fun!